Posts

As our applications grow in complexity, it becomes harder and harder to document and maintain the expected functionality of an application as well as figure out what to write unit tests against and what to leave for the automated QA testing.

Recently, I wanted to add an “Archives” to my site. While this can be easily done via a number of Jekyll plugins, Github pages (my site’s host) doesn’t allow custom plugins on their platform and won’t be adding an archives feature anytime soon. However, I did some experimenting and came up with a way to create a simple Archives page without using plugins.

Mixins in Sass are great for dynamically generating CSS properties based on passed in variables. What you might not realize is how can use another feature of SASS — maps to add greater flexibility to what kind of parameters your mixins accept.

Recently, I started using Backbone with to build an app. As I started integrating an “edit” feature I ran into a rather vexing problem: my $oid fields kept getting converted to strings whenever I updated a document.

Recursion can be a tough concept to grasp regardless of the language you decided to program in. In order to help developers who find themselves struggling with the concept (myself included), I’ve broken down the concept into five simple questions you’ll need to answer in order to write solid recursive functions.

I just got done switching one of my side-projects over to Gulp for the build process and I kept struggling with how to copy multiple folders from the src directory to the build directory in such a way that the directory’s contents and its original folder structure are preserved.

I struggled with this for a good half-hour and I figured I’d share in case anyone else ran into this issue. Long story short, I needed to return an HTML fragment for a particular ajax request from the app (in this case, search results) but the response always included the layout file I configured for the app.

Recently, I’ve discovered that making css arrows is a huge pain in the ass. Luckily, there’s a tool to make it easy for you: CSS Arrow, Please (I added the comma because it was driving me nuts). I highly recommend you check it out if you need an arrow for UI elements such as speech bubbles, tooltips, or popovers.

Getting your head around positioning elements in CSS can be very confusing. When I first started doing front-end web development, I would often end up spending hours trying to figure out why one element or another was refusing render where I thought it should. Nine times out of ten, the problem usually had something to do with the surrounding elements and what the value of their position attribute happened to be.